Does Practice Narrow the Radius of Spatial Interference in Mental Images?

Don Lyon, L3 Communications

Abstract

When people attempt to generate a mental image of a complex,
verbally-described path, crowded regions of the path suffer from spatial
interference (Lyon, Gunzelmann & Gluck, Cognitive Psychology, 57, 2008). A path
is presented as a sequence of one-unit segments within a 7x7 grid, analogous to
city blocks (e.g. Up 1 [Block]; Right 1; Down
1, etc.). Participants must decide whether each new segment intersects with
a prior part of the path. Initially, prior segments of a path within 2 grid
spaces of the current path segment produced spatial interference. Although there
were substantial individual differences, for most participants interference
radius was reduced to one grid space with under 10 hours of practice. One
possible explanation for this reduction is that, with practice, people can learn
to attend selectively to increasingly smaller areas within a vision-like
representation of the mental image, in the absence of any actual visual stimulus.